Have novels about love lost their gravitas as women’s liberation and divorce culture have taken over? Adelle Waldman doesn’t think so. In The New Yorker, she defends the timelessness of the marriage plot. “As long as marriage and love and relationships have high stakes for us emotionally, they have the potential to offer rich subject material for novelists, no matter how flimsy or comparatively uninteresting contemporary relationships seem on their surface.” Pair with: Our Jeffrey Eugenides essay on writing The Marriage Plot, which is referenced several times in Waldman’s essay.
The Marriage Plot Problem
Free Shipping from Powell’s
Portland's famous independent bookseller Powell's is offering free shipping for online orders this weekend.
Thoughts of a Hand-Wringer
If you were to guess (no cheating) the author of a new essay on hypochondria, who would you guess? Larry David? Calvin Trillin? Or someone a little more... nebbishy?
Penguin Postcards
If we were to buy ourselves a gift this year, it would be Penguin's "One Hundred Book Covers in One Box" postcard set.
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MFA Opinions
Nearly everyone has an opinion about MFA programs, and Flavorwire has 27 pulled from writers and teachers, including our own Edan Lepucki whose full piece on "The MFA Debate" can be found here.
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And Are We and Are We
Now that Horse_ebooks as we knew it is dead (or alive, depending on your viewpoint), the Internet is convening to pay tribute to the Dadaist masterpiece. At Slate, Will Oremus opines that the feed was “pretty great” even when it was a spambot, while at The Globe and Mail, Navneen Alang argues that it’s “more wonderful today, not less.”
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